The purpose of my present note is to modify
some statements I have recently made on Cervantes's writing in
Tate tate, follonzicos
. . . Once Again: The Metamorphosis of a
Locution,1 and in my book,
Cervantes the Writer and Painter of Don Quijote.
2
I was led to rethink the delicate matter of
attributions while reading Daniel Eisenberg's recent study, Las Semanas
del jardín de Miguel de
Cervantes,3 an important work on a
controversial manuscript believed by some to belong to the author of Don
Quijote.
Since no manuscript of Cervantes's published
works has been preserved, there is no way of knowing other than by conjecture
which spellings and other orthographic signs should be attributed to the
author and which to the editor or compositors. Judging from the handful of
existing autographs of letters and signed documents, Cervantes's writing
habits exhibit peculiarities

1Cervantes, 7.2 (1987), 85-89; later utilized
in my 1988 study of Don Quijote (note 2). [Daniel Eisenberg
responded to this current note with
Esta empressa, no
está impressa, Cervantes13.2 (1993): 125-26, to which Helena Percas
de Ponseti replied with Nota a la
nota sobre una nota: impressa, no
empressa, Cervantes15.1
(1995): 164-66. -FJ.]2 Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1988.3 Serie Lengua
y Literatura, 3 (Salamanca: Ediciones de la Diputación de Salamanca
y el autor, 1988). Whether or not we are convinced about the authenticity
of the manuscript the author makes a very good case for it we
owe him a debt of gratitude for his thorough scholarship and for making this
invaluable document available to us.

61

62

HELENA PERCAS DE
PONSETI

Cervantes

that, scholars have concluded, must have carried over to his
manuscripts.4
What we see in these autographs, ten of which
are reproduced and analyzed by Miguel Romera-Navarro in Autógrafos
cervantinos,5 is that Cervantes didn't
bother with accents, hardly used punctuation, capitalized prepositions,
adjectives, and nouns for no apparent reason, or wrote given and family names,
including his own, in lower case, but not consistently and with different
spellings. Writing a b rather than a v in cerbantes,
Daniel Eisenberg remarks, is one of the few consistencies to be
found.6
Another feature of the author's handwriting
is that he fairly consistently dotted his is. They are described by
Romera-Navarro as un trazo vertical [. . .] generalmente
con punto encima [. . .] a veces con rayita (p. 7).
The present revision has to do with accents,
dotted is, and capitalization. In my note,
Tate tate . . . ,
I suggested that there was a play on words wrought in the locution
estâ impressa in Cide Hamete Benengeli's well-known charge
to his pen which goes, Tate tate, follonzicos, de ninguno sea tocada
porque estâ impressa buen Rey, para mi estaua guardada (Madrid:
Juan de la Cuesta, II, 279v).
As I also suggested, two meanings are implied
in the locution above, the contextual meaning of esta empresa (this
task, deed, emprise or undertaking), and the extended meaning of estâ
impressa (has been irrevocably recorded in print). How the locution appeared
as it did in the Juan de la Cuesta edition of 1615 is one point of the present
revision.
If Cervantes did not write the accent on
estâ in the locution estâ impressa because he didn't
write accents, the accent was supplied by the editor or compositor before
the adjectival participle impressa. Impressa, on the other
hand, is what Cervantes must

have written in his manuscript with a clearly visible dotted i. Why
would the editor or compositor go out of his way to choose the noncontextual
meaning, estâ impressa, rather than the contextual one, esta
empressa? Most likely, the accent on estâ was automatically
prompted by the i of impressa. Esta empresa has been
emended in most editions to the present day. Esta impresa, without
an accent on the a and without a footnote to call attention to the
deletion but retaining the i of the supposed noun, is occasionally
found in some editions. Such a correction is unsatisfactory for two reasons:
it implies both that an error was introduced, the accent on
estâ, and that Cervantes did not know the difference between
impressa and empresa, which are not synonymous. This assumption
is hardly warranted in view of the correct usage of both terms elsewhere,
as I indicated in my earlier note.7
If, indeed, the locution happened the way I
have reconstructed, then, we could assume one of two things: either Cervantes
had in mind the phonetic accent on the verb estâ from the start
but did not write it because he didn't use accents (really an academic question
that would take us back to my original reading), or else, and perhaps more
subtly, that he started writing the contextual locution esta empresa
and changed its thrust in mid-thought to estâ impressa thereby
saying two things at once, esta empresa estâ impressa, and implying
with the double locution as I said in my first note that the
task of writing about Don Quixote's adventures, reserved exclusively for
Cervantes's Pen, had been brought to an irrevocable end in print as decreed
by his Creator Cervantes.
Variations of this technique of shifting direction
in mid-sentence (e.j., Sancho's argument to stop Don Quijote from attacking
the actors, II, 11)8; of saying or implying
two things with the same words (e.j., Don Quijote's advice to Sancho
governor-to-be),9 of repeating a word with
a different meaning (e.j., estrecho estrecho, narrow strait,
in Don Lorenzo's sonnet, II, 18), of redefining a word by its application
in context (e.j., atrevido

applied to Don Quijote, the ferret and the devil in the same
episode),10 and many others, are significant
features of Cervantine art. When no significance is perceived in language
anomalies or in unusual syntax, they pass for errors. Such
ungrammaticalities (the term belongs to Michael Riffaterre, quoted
by Michael McGaha)11 as estâ
impressa are spontaneous manifestations in the spoken language of suspended
thoughts in the stream of consciousness of the author and, of course, of
the characters who utter the words. The ungrammaticality itself
is what, according to Michael McGaha (referring to the Battle of the Sheep)
leads us straight to the matrix of the passage or episode in
which it appears and of the novel of which it forms a part (note
11).
Coming back to Cervantes's spelling habits
as observed in his autographs, we notice with Romera-Navarro (pp. 14-15)
that Cervantes more likely than not capitalized nouns and adjectives referring
to royalty. He wrote, for instance, Reyno de granada (pp. 66,
70), Reales (pp. 26, 28, 30) real is a coin meaning
belonging to the king, Joan Corominas tells
us12, Muy Poderoso Señor
(p. 70), and so on. It could well be that Cervantes capitalized
Rey, Reyna, Emperadores, and
Príncipes, and not muerte, the figure that
rides along with the King and Queen in the cart of Death. Modern editions
capitalize Muerte. Short of seeing the manuscript itself, we
will never know to whom to attribute these spellings, but more importantly
whether they are accidents or whether they respond to some deliberate or
subconscious pattern in the author's mind.
Even though considerations of spelling do not
alter the substance of my study, I should not have adduced capitalization
vs. lower case without a caveat in my recent book, Cervantes the Writer
and Painter of Don Quijote. My deductions are primarily derived
from contextual and intertextual evidence within the socio-historical context,
and from the frequency with which characters are referred to by their status
or occupation (Caballero, Bachiller, Hidalgo) rather than by their names.

10 Discussed
in Cervantes the Writer, pp. 46-47.11 See his article
Intertextuality as a Guide to the Interpretation of the Battle of the
Sheep (Don Quixote I, 18), to be published in Cervantes:
Essays offered to Luis A. Murillo (ed. James A. Parr. Newark, DE: Juan
de la Cuesta (1990]). The author has generously sent me a copy at my
request.12 In his
Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana,
under Rey.

9.2 (1989)

A Revision: Cervantes's Writing

65

Having said this, I shall make a considered
guess about the lower case for rocinante in Part II of Don
Quijote. Logically, an editor would have capitalized the given name of
the horse, Rocinante, as was done throughout Part I. Sancho's donkey,
Dapple, referred to as el rucio, is logically not capitalized. It
is made up of an adjectival noun preceded by an article. But,
rocinante, Don Quijote's made up name for his nag, does not fall under
the same syntactical category as el rucio. Rocinante is not preceded
by an article, e.j., el rocinante. It is clearly a given name consistently
not capitalized in Part II. It seems to be Cervantes's choice respected by
his editor. If so, it would be legitimate to attribute significance to this
peculiarity. Rightly or wrongly I did.
In the last analysis, I have to agree with
Daniel Eisenberg that lacking evidence to the contrary, Cuesta's texts
are punctuated and, with exceptions, spelled as Cervantes wanted them to
be.13